In the grip of a guilty pleasure

'I find myself thinking that there must be more to life than this.
But then after a not very long break, I start missing porn. I need
to get that hit again.'

A staggering 1000 new internet porn sites are created
every day. And a growing number of Australians are finding their
lure irresistible - and destructive, writes Simon
Castles.

Mike likes to get a particular computer station in the back
corner of the 24-hour internet cafe he visits often - more often
than a man without a job can afford. The cubicle feels familiar and
is marginally more secluded than the others that line the walls.
Late at night, which is when Mike usually arrives, the cafe is not
as busy or bright as during the day. He finds his spot, logs on and
starts looking at pornography. And sometimes he's still there 24
hours later.

"They have snack food in the place, and that's all I feed myself
on - a soft drink, a packet of chips," he says. "Porn is that much
of an obsession for me."

Mike was addicted to the pokies in the '90s and now believes
he's addicted to pornography. "The rush I get looking at porn is
very similar to what I used to get gambling," he says. "It's that
same sense of trying to fill some void, an emptiness, of getting
some pleasure that will briefly make me feel better."

Mike, 45, has worked as a taxi driver and on the railways, but
he now lives on welfare. He feels that his addiction to porn -
apparent since he was a teenager, but given unwelcome stimulus by
the internet - is robbing him of money, time and emotion. That,
like any addiction, his dependence on porn is impacting on his
ability to lead a normal, balanced life.

"Usually after I've masturbated" - which Mike does at the
internet cafe, on the sly and up to three times a visit - "I find
myself thinking that there must be more to life than this. But then
after a not very long break, I start missing porn. I need to get
that hit again. And I feel like there's nothing else in life to
look forward to."

Mike's case might be extreme, but it is far from isolated. There
is an apparently growing minority of men - and it is mostly men -
for whom porn is a source of intense and ongoing anguish.

Melbourne sex therapist Dr Janet Hall is seeing more men than
ever who feel they are addicted to porn. About 10 per cent of her
therapy time is now spent dealing with porn-related issues - either
men who feel they are looking at too much of it, or women who think
their partner's porn use is excessive and a threat to the
relationship.

But is it really possible to be addicted to pornography? Can
porn be placed in the same category as drugs, alcohol and gambling?
Or is talk of porn addiction simply another case of the West
pathologising human behaviour? Perhaps fear of porn actually
reflects a Christian fear of sex, or broader society's fear of a
new technology such as the internet.

Certainly the internet is central to the porn boom: the net's
rapid growth has spurred the popularity of pornography, and vice
versa. Psychologists talk of the internet as offering the triple-A
lure of accessibility, anonymity and affordability.

Now porn is always just a mouse-click away, at any bored or
restless minute of the day. And porn, as its many airbrushed stars
want you to believe, always "wants" you, is always ready and
willing. It's little wonder the internet has been referred to as
the crack cocaine of porn addiction.

There are an estimated 260 million pages of pornography on the
internet - a startling statistic but one that becomes outdated even
as it's cited: about 1000 new porn sites are created every day.
What remains more constant is porn's share of all internet traffic
- about 25 per cent.

Once considered something of a back-alley vice, porn has become
a popular online pastime. In the words of writer David Amsden:
"Cyber-porn has become the raunchy wallpaper to respectable lives."
Millions of Australians look at pornography on a regular basis; it
is a decidedly mainstream activity.

According to the 2003 Australian Sexual Health and Relationship
Survey, 37 per cent of men and 16 per cent of women had looked at
an X-rated movie in the past year. The internet will have increased
porn's popularity in the years since.

And for the great majority of porn users, porn is hunky-dory:
they perceive no deleterious effects in their consumption of it.
The Understanding Pornography in Australia research project, which
surveyed more than 1000 porn users, found that 56.8 per cent said
porn had a generally positive impact on their attitudes towards
sexuality, and 34.5 per cent said it had no effect at all. The
project, conducted by academics Alan McKee, Catharine Lumby and
Kath Albury, found that just 0.4 per cent felt they were addicted
to porn.

The research has its critics, however. Dr Michael Flood,
co-author of the Youth and Pornography in Australia report, points
out that the project's sample is self-selected. "It seems to me
that those users of porn who have a real problem with their own use
- who find it shameful or harmful to their personal lives or
relationships - would be less likely to participate in such a
survey," he says. "So I think the study is probably skewed towards
those people who are more comfortable with, even proud of, their
pornography use."

Peter, 45, is neither comfortable with nor proud of his
pornography consumption. Like Mike, he says porn acts like a drug
on his system, and that once he starts looking at it, he can't
stop. He believes porn shuts him down emotionally, something that
didn't help his marriage, which ended six years ago. Peter now
attends Sex Addicts Anonymous, which meets each week in East
Melbourne.

"I know some people can just watch a little bit of porn and it
can be OK for them," Peter says. "But for me it's not OK, it never
has been and it never will be. It's always triggered something
inside of me which is unhealthy and leads to more unhealthy
behaviour."

Peter and Mike and the other compulsive porn users who spoke to
The Sunday Age related personal stories traced with strikingly
similar feelings about their porn use. They all talked of how, when
looking at porn, they feel almost in a trance, a numb zone where
they lose sense of time and place.

They feel porn is a quick fix, a way to temper, or hold off,
unwelcome thoughts and emotions. Common also are the overwhelming
feelings of shame and self-hatred, along with the frustration that
they can't seem to break the habit.

One man who, with great effort, did break with porn was writer
David Mura, who shared his thoughts in an eloquent and insightful
essay, A Male Grief: Notes on Pornography and Addiction. He writes:
"In pornographic perception, the addict experiences a type of
vertigo, a fearful exhilaration, a moment when all the addict's
ties to the outside world do indeed seem to be cut or numbed. That
sense of endless falling, that rush, is what the addict chases
again and again."

It is a rush, porn users say, that the internet has made all too
easy to experience. Gone are the days when porn meant a potentially
embarrassing trip to the newsagent or adult bookshop. Suddenly an
endless stream of porn, of a variety beyond individual imagination,
is waiting behind a screen in the living room or study.

AS HAS long been observed, America is quick to slap things with
an addiction label. It is no surprise that it is in the US that
work in the area of sex and porn addiction has been pioneered. The
leader in the field is Dr Patrick Carnes, who has written a string
of self-help bestsellers about sex addiction, including In the
Shadows of the Net: Breaking Free of Compulsive Online Sexual
Behaviour. Carnes estimates that between 3 and 6 per cent of people
are sex addicts of some kind.

But does this inclination to label something an addiction
increase the number of people who come to believe they have that
problem?

A study by ChristiaNet.com this year found that 50 per cent of
Christian men and 20 per cent of Christian women believed they were
addicted to porn. Plenty could be said about these findings, but
let's keep it to this: the moral stance a person has about
pornography clearly influences whether they feel they are
addicted.

Associate Professor Alan McKee from the Queensland University of
Technology, one of the researchers on the Understanding Pornography
in Australia project, believes most studies on pornography begin
with the assumption that it is bad and then seek to find out why
it's bad. He is therefore sceptical of much of the hand-wringing
research that comes out. McKee believes it is possible for people
to be addicted to porn, just as it is possible for them to be
addicted to anything, but that the numbers are probably quite
small.

"It would be interesting to find out how many people feel they
are addicted to chips, chocolate, good red wine, sunshine,
exercise. I think you would find that more people are addicted to
those than are addicted to pornography," McKee says.

His research colleague Kath Albury, a lecturer in cultural
studies at the University of Sydney, believes much of the current
anxiety about porn actually reflects broader social and cultural
anxieties about sex, masturbation, private time and new
technologies. For Albury, the past is instructive.

"In the 17th and 18th centuries, similar arguments were being
made about the effects of novels on young women to the arguments
that are being made about the effects of net porn on men today,"
she says. "It was said novels drew women away from the family, that
it isolated them and made them antisocial, and that it encouraged
them to have fantasies that would make them unsuitable for
real-life relationships."

Sharon, a 43-year-old mother of two, can only regret that it was
cyber porn and not novels that drew her away from family and
friends in the late 1990s. At least novels would not have left
images in her head that she struggles to erase, even after years of
being "clean". She started looking at porn when in a "dark hole of
depression", and says that it developed into an addiction that
threatened her closest relationships.

"It became so I was looking at porn every day, for hours and
hours," Sharon says. "I would forgo things like going out with
friends - I would stay at home and look at porn. I saw the most
disgusting, degrading stuff - stuff I never knew existed.

"I was looking at bestiality and scat (porn that involves
faeces). It dawned on me one day that I was losing my relationship
with my kids, and I had lost my relationships with family and
friends, everybody."

Sharon's experience touches on the reasons why those who have an
obsessive need to look at porn do see it as an addiction. Her story
is echoed countless times, if usually by men, on the message boards
of websites such as no-porn.com. Addicts believe their compulsion
to look at porn is highly detrimental to their lives, impacts on
their ability to have healthy relationships, and gets worse the
longer they don't do anything about it.

Like an addiction to drugs or alcohol, an addiction to porn
seems to involve users needing more of it, and harder stuff, in
order to get the high they once experienced. Peter's admission is
typical: "You start looking at fairly moderate images and you keep
building up and building up," he says. "I haven't got into anything
I know of that's illegal, thank God, but the possibility is always
there, because when I use (porn) I always feel I need a bigger,
stronger hit every time."

PORN addiction is not currently included in the Diagnostic and
Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the bible of the
psychiatric profession. But debate is ongoing about whether it
should be included in future editions.

It's a debate taking place far from the 12-step meetings and
online support groups of ordinary men and women who feel their porn
consumption is out of control. And it's a debate taking place far
from the millions of Australians who look at pornography regularly
and are completely comfortable with it.

Mike attends meetings of Sex Addicts Anonymous but is struggling
to put a stop to his all-night (and sometimes all-day) sessions at
the internet cafe. He feels incredibly alone, but in what he is
dealing with, he is actually far from it.

The week after Mike spoke to The Sunday Age, he checked
into a rehabilitation program run by the Salvation Army in Sydney.
The program is traditionally for alcoholics, drug addicts and
gamblers - the people the Salvos have helped for 125 years. Mike
asked if he could be admitted, even though his addiction was not to
booze or drugs but to pornography. The Salvos, sniffing the winds
of change, said yes.

Some names have been changed.

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